International Cat Speculators Since 2006

Archive for the ‘Abortion’ Category

I’ve seen some bad reporting over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an article that seems to be deliberately designed to make people more ignorant.

Let’s look at a few points:

1. If you work at certain types of for-profit companies, they no longer have to cover the cost of any contraception that they say violates their religious beliefs

The Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) requires most health insurance plans to cover birth control without cost-sharing. Without healthcare coverage, the pill can cost about $25 a month and an IUD (intrauterine device) can cost up to $900 (though it’s inserted once and lasts up to 12 years).

So my first observation is that they all but admit that this is about saving a measly $25 per month at worst. And there’s the elephant in the room that this is covering something that anywhere else would not be an insurance item.

They also tacitly admit that there was only 4 of the 20 methods covered. So really, it’s hard to see this being a very serious sort of issue. They also start out by talking about the Pill, giving the impression that that is one of the methods removed – but it’s not.

2. All three female Justices dissented, arguing that this ruling limits women’s rights

All of the women on the court are liberals. The liberals voted for less religious liberty, and only one of them is a man. Apparently (since this article is aimed at women) it’s important that you know that all the women on the court were rooting for you. Or something.

Then there’s this quote.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote the dissenting opinion and was joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan and Justice Stephen Breyer (the only male justice who dissented). “The exemption sought by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga would…deny legions of women who do not hold their employers’ beliefs access to contraceptive coverage,” Ginsberg wrote

Here’s the thing about that. It’s complete nonsense.

It is not even remotely true. It is literally impossible for one simple reason: this decision has given employers of any sort precisely no, zero, zilch rights to determine what pharmaceuticals and employee might buy. That’s not a right employers have ever had, sought, or wanted, even in their wildest dreams.

Yet, that claim not only appears in a media report, but a supreme court decision.

3. The ruling may depress use of IUDs at some privately held corporations that deem it a form of emergency contraception

This is where we really get into the weird zone. I mean, who cared about the IUD use rate at privately held corporations? Seriously, that’s a really weird thing to say.

Now, it would be more useful to say, “this will reduce the use of this really effective method”. And they do try to say that… sort of.

But note this:

The IUD can also be used as emergency contraception if it is inserted five days after intercourse, hence the Hobby Lobby’s objection to it and not birth control pills.

That’s about as good an example of what the article does all the way through: skirts the core issue that this ruling is about abortifacients. Seriously, the word never appears yet that was the entire ethical objection that the court case was about.

4. Women’s rights groups are angry because they see the ruling as a loss of autonomy for women

Feminists don’t like this? Gee, who knew.

See what I mean about making people more ignorant?

Oh, and did you notice that having someone else pay for your birth control somehow = more autonomy. Feminism, gotta love it. (Seriously, you have to, it’s in the rules of modern liberalism.)

In fact, this point is so idiotic, it required detailed fisking.

Some women’s rights advocates have taken the argument even further than Ginsburg did. Up until this point the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) has been interpreted as a protection for individuals’ religious practices—not those of corporations. The Supreme Court just said that these protections also extend to for-profit companies,

Bzzzt. Wrong. It ruled that when you have a closely-held company, forcing a company to do something is forcing an individual (or a small group of individuals) to do something.

but didn’t protect a woman’s right to choose her method of birth control.

Bzzzt. Wrong. As pointed out above, this ruling says precisely nothing about that. It’s about who pays for it.

Thus, many critics argue, the Supreme Court decided that corporations are people, but women are not.

They may even honestly believe that. But I doubt it – I mean, they’re not that stupid, aren’t they?

Women’s rights groups say restricting insurance coverage for some types of contraception, or making coverage more difficult to obtain, undermines access to birth control in general and point to studies that have shown that offering greater access to contraception—rather than restricting it—leads to fewer unintended pregnancies and thus reduces the number of abortions by 75 percent annually.

That’s a true statement, they do say that. They also say that women are more autonomous when given $25/month worth of pills by their employer. Did I mention that? Yep… ok, just checking.

5. Under the ruling, some corporations could attempt to refuse coverage for other, non-contraceptive medications and procedures citing their religious beliefs

But even the people who wrote this admit almost immediately that it’s a bogus claim:

In the majority opinion written by Justice Alito, he specifies that the ruling applies only to the contraceptive mandate, and states that it should not be understood to include to other insurance mandates, like those for blood transfusions or vaccinations.

Well, Eric Holder no only has had his vote stolen after his refusal to take voter fraud seriously, but he’s also had a harsh telling off because of what he does chose to prosecute – and the fact he’s so determined to do it he’ll do it without evidence. Remember, this is the man who in theory should be the nation’s top lawyer.

After 18 months of litigation, the DOJ’s case was thrown out of federal court, and the department was chastised in a scathing ruling by U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp for filing a case with no evidence.

Judge Ryskamp wrote that Holder’s complete failure to present any evidence of wrongdoing, coupled with the DOJ’s cozy relationship with PWC and their apparent joint decision to destroy video surveillance footage of the alleged “obstruction,” caused the court to suspect a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration. “The Court is at a loss as to why the Government chose to prosecute this particular case in the first place,” wrote Judge Ryskamp. “The Court can only wonder whether this action was the product of a concerted effort between the Government and PWC, which began well before the date of the incident at issue, to quell Ms. Pine’s activities rather than to vindicate the rights of those allegedly aggrieved by Ms. Pine’s conduct.”

The Obama administration has been accused of being the most pro-abortion in US history. Stories like this tend to strengthen that claim quite considerably.

An Act to specify the circumstances in which contraceptives and information relating to contraception may be supplied and given to young persons, to define the circumstances under which sterilisations may be undertaken, and to provide for the circumstances and procedures under which abortions may be authorised after having full regard to the rights of the unborn child

…gives no rights to any unborn child.

Good to know, that.

And by “that”, I mean the fact that no law in this country has any meaning whatsoever.

In spite of this judgement there are two things we do know.

Unborn children are still human

This law was intended to protect them

I actually feel sorry for the judges. Sooner or later their consciences will catch up with them, and when that happens they will have to live with the horrific consequences of what they’ve done. I don’t think any human being should feel what they will feel that day.

I guess I could just leave it. Maybe it’d fall off. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

But if I had any sense I’d get it seen to.

Or I might catch a serious disease which if left untreated would kill me.

It’s around injuries and accidents that we have developed the mordern health care system. “First do no Harm” is what doctors sign up to – they’re there to fix stuff that would otherwise kill us or do serious injury.

Pregnancy is not a disease. It’s a normal bodily function (in the female of the species anyway).* Without it, the human race would have ceased to exist centuries ago. Without it, this blog would have no readers.

I am assured by women I know who have had several children that pregnancy is seriously inconvenient. It typically starts with months of vomiting and nausea and vomiting and ends with a very large belly that makes certain tasks quite difficult and squashes various internal organs creating such problems as a need to frequently urinate. In the case of an illegitimate conception, a late term pregnancy tells the whole world of the shame of the pregnant woman.

(Of course, in this day and age there is rarely shame in such situations, indeed the entire concept of an illegitimate pregnancy is largly absent from our society. Strangely however the feminist movement seems to forget this fact whenever abortion is discussed.)

I am also assured that life after birth is severely inconvenient too. But believe it or not, that’s beside the point. Any parent who really finds the inconvenience of a live baby too much to bear may utilise foster parenting or adoption.

No, this post is about abortion and questions of ending a pregnancy. To me, the ultimate question is one of the convenience of terminating a pregnancy verses the fact of the human rights of the baby. Does the woman have the right to “her own body” or does the conceived baby?

Again, let me more clearly define what I’m talking about. I’m speaking of situations where the woman has consented to the sexual act knowing that one probably outcome of choosing pleasure over responsibility is a pregnancy. Rape or incest are quite different debates to consensual situations.

But back to my original point. Healthcare is fixing a broken arm, or treating a disease. Doctors do not cut off arms because patients ask. You cannot go into a hospital and ask to be injected with smallpox because you’d like a few days off work or a new experience.

So why can a woman go into a hospital and ask for a procedure which, if universally applied, would end the human species?

Police were called to a Planned Parenthood clinic, and told that the father of a girl (age 14) inside was refusing to leave.

Instead of the police arresting the father, it turned out the clinic was in the wrong. They point-blank refused to bring the child out to the police claiming that because she was pregnant she was automatically emancipated. It seems that their refusal almost had at least one member of the clinic arrested.

Hat Tip Jill Stanek via twitter. Jill also points out in that the police should have been called by the clinic not because her farther was asking to see her (as her guardian, he had a perfect right to) but because she has been subject to statutory rape. Instead, they were hell bent on getting her to abort her baby.

It happened when Hentoff was reporting on the case of Baby Jane Doe. She was a Long Island infant born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus, which is excess fluid in the cranium. With surgery, spina-bifida babies can grow up to be productive adults. Yet Baby Jane’s parents, on their doctors’ advice, had refused both surgery to close her spine and a shunt to drain the fluid from her brain. In resisting the federal government’s attempt to enforce treatment, the parents pleaded privacy.

As Hentoff told the Washington Times in a 1989 profile, his “curiosity was not so much the case itself but the press coverage.” Everyone in the media was echoing the same talking points about “women’s rights” and “privacy.” “Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there’s something wrong,” Hentoff told the Times. “I finally figured out they were listening to the [parents’] lawyer.” Hentoff dug into the case and the abortion industry at large, and what he found shocked him. He came across the published reports of experiments in what doctors at Yale-New Haven Hospital called “early death as a management option” for infants “considered to have little or no hope of achieving meaningful ‘humanhood.’” He talked with handicapped people who could have been killed by abortion. His liberal friends didn’t appreciate his conversion:

“They were saying, ‘What’s the big fuss about? If the parents had known she was going to come in this way, they would have had an abortion. So why don’t you consider it a late abortion and go on to something else? Here were liberals, decent people, fully convinced themselves that they were for individual rights and liberties but willing to send into eternity these infants because they were imperfect, inconvenient, costly. I saw the same attitude on the part of the same kinds of people toward abortion, and I thought it was pretty horrifying.”

As the organizers began to pass out white crosses to the pro-life marchers, many on the other side began to steal crosses so they could hold them upside down. As we took formation in the street, the pro-aborts were lining up beside us screaming the most foul and sexual things at the pro-lifers. They were holding the crosses upside down, waiving rubber sexual organs and throwing condoms filled with water at us.

I was up in the front of the March with some of the other speakers and a group of youth and we just kept in an attitude of prayer as we ignored what was being yelled at us. I had an easier time ignoring them as I don’t speak German, but I was told later what was being said.

The German police did an amazing job keeping the pro-aborts away from us as we marched through Berlin; I must credit the police there with being some of the best I have ever seen. When we arrived at the church for the end of the march, the pro-aborts tried to break through the police lines and were very unsuccessful. One lone man got into the church service but was carried out when he rushed for the microphone.

This later paragraph I think show just how understated his account is.

After the youth party that followed the march, Michel and I rode the metro back to our hostel late that night. We started to talk to a couple about the march and they got up and ran off the train. A minute later they returned with many of the pro-abort protesters from that day. We ended up staying on the metro past our stop and had a great conversation with some of them.

“With some of them”. No doubt in my mind of the attitude the others in that group…

On May 3 an Oklahoma judge delayed enactment of a new law mandating that mothers get ultrasounds before abortions for 45 days.

Oklahoma’s ultrasound law goes farther than others. According to the Associated Press:

The law requires doctors to use a vaginal probe, which provides a clearer picture of the fetus than a regular ultrasound, and to describe the fetus in detail, including its dimensions, whether arms, legs and internal organs are visible and whether there is cardiac activity.

That is just not true, obviously skewed to bias readers away from supporting the law.

The law actually states that the abortion or technician “us[e] either a vaginal transducer or an abdominal transducer, whichever would display the embryo or fetus more clearly.”

That said, this is indeed the first pre-abortion ultrasound legislation to specify the option of using a vaginal transducer. These are different in probe placement than typical abdominal ultrasounds.

I give it about 3 days before left-wing blogs here start repeating the “rape by statute” line the pro abortion activists have feed the American MSM.

About this Blog

This Blog is the long time home of a blogger known across the internet as ScrubOne (That's Scrub One not Scru Bone). Where this handle has not been available, he is known as ScrubOneHD (HD for Half Done).

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ScrubOne confesses to the Christian faith, and conservative politics but does not necessarily blog according to public perception of either.

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